Chapter 301: Sinking

She was in her gray uniform, the same one she had worn in the garden. Her short hair whipped across her face. Someone had given her a pistol, and she held it with both hands, stiff and clumsy. Her mouth was a thin line. She was shaking all over.

But she was fighting.

She fired. The shot went wide. She fired again. She did not duck, or run, or scream. She stood at the rail with the sea spray in her face and shot at the men who had come to kill her son’s friends.

"Captain!" The shout came from the wheelhouse. An old man in a stained cap leaned out of the door and bellowed over the din. He had one hand on the wheel and the other waving wildly. His face was red and furious.

"I have a firearm somewhere on the ship!"

"Where?" Marcus yelled back.

"In the stores! Below! I do not remember!" The old man’s voice cracked. "I said it was a boat, not a navy! I am a fisherman!"

A wave slammed into the hull. The ship lurched. Crates slid across the deck and crashed against the rail, and a man went down on one knee, cursing.

Sienna grabbed Viktor’s sleeve and held on.

She clutched him with both hands, as tight as she could. Her fingers were numb. Her heart was a bird in a box, flinging itself at the walls. She pressed her face against his arm and breathed in the smell of salt and smoke and him.

She did not let go. Across the gap, a man stepped up onto the rail of the other ship.

She saw him through the smoke. He was tall and broad, in a black coat with the collar turned up. His face was hard and square. He wore a thick belt of gear across his chest, and on his shoulder, held steady, rested a long dark tube.

It was a launcher. Sienna’s breath stopped.

He lifted it. He settled it against his shoulder and sighted along it, slowly, with the care of a man who had done this many times. He was aiming at the middle of the ship, at the place where the iron stairs came up from below. He was aiming at the exact spot where Viktor and Sienna stood.

His finger tightened.

And then, for one tiny second, he looked past the sight.

He saw her.

It was only a glance. A flash of a face in the smoke, a girl in a gray pullover with her hair whipped across her eyes, clinging to the arm of a tall man. But he saw it. He saw the shape of her cheek and the set of her mouth. He knew that face. He had been shown a photograph of it, again and again.

That is her. The girl. The one we came for. His eyes went wide. The tube was already firing.

He had let go of his grip. His hand had been closing, closing, and the motion could not be taken back. All he had was a split second. He threw his weight against the weapon and wrenched it sideways. The barrel jerked.

He was not fast enough. There was a flash.

It was white and silent and enormous, and for a long moment Sienna saw nothing else. Then the sound came, a huge, rolling thunder that she felt in her ribs and her teeth and the soles of her feet. The deck leaped under her. She was thrown against Viktor and he was thrown against the wall, and they went down together in a tangle of arms.

Heat rolled over them.

Wood splintered. Metal screamed. Something huge and heavy tore loose from the far end of the ship and fell into the sea with a long, slow crash. A column of black smoke climbed into the sky, shot through with orange.

The rocket had hit the stern.

It had missed them by thirty feet. If the man had not pulled back, it would have taken the middle of the ship, and nothing would have been left but burning planks. But it had struck the far end instead, and the far end was gone.

Sienna lay on her side on the wet deck with her cheek against the cold iron. She could hear screaming. It came from very far away. It sounded like the voices of people at the bottom of a well. Someone was shouting a name over and over. Someone else was crying out, a high, thin, animal sound. Boots pounded. Men called to each other through the smoke.

Viktor, she tried to say. No sound came out.

She felt his hand on her face. It was rough and warm. She felt him shake her gently, and he said something she could not hear, a word, then another, then her name. His face swam above her, white and furious and terrified. He was shouting.

But the words ran together. They slid away. The roar of the fire dimmed to a soft hum, and the cold of the deck melted into something warm and distant.

The scare had finally done it.

It had carried her out of her own body, quietly, like a hand lifting a feather. The screaming faded. The sky above her blurred from gray to white to nothing at all.

She drifted, and she drifted, and she did not come back.

—

The man came in the early afternoon.

He was one of the Don’s trackers, a thin, quiet man with sunburned cheeks and salt dried white on his boots. He had not slept. He had come straight from the coast, with a phone in one hand and a folded map in the other. He stopped in the doorway of the study and waited to be noticed.

Don Konstantin sat behind his desk with his arm in a sling.

He had changed into a fresh white shirt. His hair was combed. A cup of black coffee steamed at his elbow, and he had not touched it. Carina stood by the window with her hands folded, pale and straight, her wound hidden under a loose dress.

"Speak," the Don said.

"Boss." The man bowed his head. "Before we could confirm whether Miss Katalia was on that ship, we spotted Bandesh men."